Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ACCESS ALL RECORDS, STRIXIAN 99TH REGIMENT.

  The cogitator built into the stack spools and clicks. It sounds bad-tempered. The screen flickers and then autofills with a response, one letter at a time.

  AUTHORISATION REQUIRED. ALPHA-GRADE.

  Fel inputs the code that Raine gave him again and prays inwardly, because he doesn’t dare speak aloud.

  The cogitator ticks and burrs for what seems a long time, while the cursor blinks green against grainy blackness, then the screen autofills again with lists and lists of records. There are hundreds of documents pertaining to the Strixian 99th. Fel cross-references them with another phrase.

  CORIS BELT, THE.

  Fel is rewarded with a record of the Strixians’ destruction at the Coris Belt, just as Raine said. To a soul. He changes his phrase.

  HYXX.

  The same. Destroyed again, to a soul.

  GHOLL.

  The same.

  CAWTER.

  Again.

  And again, and again. A dozen battlefields. A dozen deaths.

  Hells, Fel thinks.

  He goes back to the beginning. To the record of their founding. The document is dense with Munitorum jargon, but Fel can get the shape of it. Ten thousand souls taken from a dozen different worlds. The regiment is cited as fleet-based, but they have no homeworld. No operational headquarters. They are made from nothing and nowhere.

  Like ghosts.

  At the bottom of the record, underneath the crusade seal, there are the names of those associated with the founding. Lord-Marshals. Commissariat. Departmento officials. Fel doesn’t recognise a single one of the names, and then there’s the matter of the regiment’s founding date. It sticks in Fel’s head, because it’s a date that all who serve in the Bale Stars Crusade know.

  The reconsecration of Steadfast, one month to the day after the recapture. The greatest celebration in the history of the Bale Stars Crusade. A day they made songs for. Fel gets a very bad feeling, seeing that date in connection with the Strixians. Like losing the ground underfoot.

  He enters another query into the cogitator, requesting the records for every one of those associated with the founding. The cogitator spools, whirs, then spits out a list of records, each one of them marked with the same red lettering.

  KIA.

  Fel has seen death records before. They usually specify the way of it, post-humous commendation or dishonour. Not so with these. They are all unusually spare on detail, but that is not the only thing which unites them. Like all death records, they are countersigned by a chief medicae. In this case, by the same chief medicae.

  Surgeon-Major Isabella Luz.

  Fel checks his chrono. He has no more than eight of Ghael’s minutes left. It’ll have to be long enough. He sets a new query.

  ACCESS ALL RECORDS, SURGEON-MAJOR ISABELLA LUZ.

  The cogitator churns and clicks, then skips a beat. Fel flexes his fingers absently.

  The screen autofills with a list of records. At the top is Luz’s own service record. It is marked the same way as the ones before it. In red, with the letters ‘KIA’.

  Another ghost, though this one had a life before she died.

  Along with Luz’s service record, Fel has access to all of her case notes and studies. To every cut that Isabella Luz ever made. Most of them are pict-feed captures or vox-thief recordings. There’s one in particular that snags his attention, because of that damned date again. The reconsecration of Steadfast. He tries to play the record, but the cogitator clucks angrily. The screen flickers, and text autofills.

  INPUT PASSCODE, it says.

  Fel’s bad feeling gets a whole lot worse. Every record here is protected by alpha-grade measures. For the recording to require an extra passcode means it’s more than important.

  More than alpha-grade.

  He frowns and backs out of the records, then plugs in the datakey that Raine gave to him and copies everything to it. The Strixians. The dead. Every cut that Isabella Luz ever made. He knows that doing so has likely triggered an alert somewhere and that whoever buried the files will soon know that they have been accessed. It’s a choice that can’t be unmade. One that might make him just as dead as all of those others, if they catch him.

  But that’s the trick to it, he thinks, as he pulls the datakey, just like with any other operation.

  You don’t get yourself caught.

  Fel has not long made it back through the elevator doors on the main floor when the lights come back on and the guards reappear around the corner to return to their post. They both stop in the corridor at the sight of him. They are holding their rifles at ease, but he can see the moment before movement in the way that they stand. He won’t have time to take them both out before they can shoot him, or raise the alarm.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’ asks the first.

  Fel holds up his hands and softens his voice when he speaks.

  ‘I don’t quite know where here is,’ he says. ‘I was looking to get out when the lights went and I lost my bearings.’

  The second one frowns at that. It pulls at the scars on his face. Scars that say he knows how to fight.

  ‘You lost your bearings,’ he says, slowly, as if he’s turning the words over.

  Fel thinks about how quick he’d have to be. How much he’d have to hurt them, and how poorly that sits. He’s careful not to let it show. Not to let them see the moment before movement.

  ‘Like I said, I was just looking to get out,’ he says, with a shrug. ‘Before someone misspoke their rites of maintenance.’

  The second one stays frowning, but the first one snorts a laugh.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ he says, and he steps aside to let Fel walk by. The second one does too, after a moment.

  ‘You’d better find your way out,’ the guard with the fighter’s scars says. ‘And go careful not to lose your bearings.’

  Fel laughs at that, because it’s what they want to hear.

  ‘Understood,’ he says.

  Thirteen

  Blades at your back

  Severina Raine cannot dismiss the dream and the anger she felt at the sound of the word traitor. She lets that anger push her as they advance upwards through the Sanctum of Bones. With Cretia Ommatid occupied by Zane, the Sighted have returned in force, flooding from the spire’s darkness to protect their master. Like always, they count oath-breakers and fanatics amongst their ranks. Biologis adepts, and surgeons with augmented hands for cutting. Even the sick fight for them, just as Vander said, still clad in their gowns and bandages, with their wounds turning to rot.

  Raine ducks behind the cover of a tipped gurney as glass jars burst from solid shot just above her head. Fragments scatter around her, like snow with sharp edges. This place was an augmetics implantation suite before the war. It is lined with cots. Multi-limbed surgical rigs hang from the ceiling, armed with cutting blades and wicked drills. Channels are cut into the floor to help the blood flow away. It is doing so now, though it is black and thick and slow from the Sighted dead.

  ‘Ommatid must be close,’ Hale says. ‘They refuse to fall back.’

  Grey Company’s captain is crouched beside Raine, taking cover too. He is bruised badly, with one eye as good as closed by it. Hale ejects the cell from his laspistol and pushes a fresh one home. He fires around the cover. More solid shot hits the tiles in answer, sending splinters into the air. Across the room, on the other side of the blood channel, the Kavrone fire from behind cover with their marksman rifles. Where the Antari are made for breaking, the Dragoons are made for precision. Excision.

  ‘She is getting worse, too,’ he says, nodding to Zane.

  The psyker has been dragged into a sitting position, kept behind cover. Zane bleeds steadily and slowly from her nose and ears. It mats the furs she wears around her shoulders, making her look
all the more like a wounded animal. Zane murmurs in slurred Antari, her breathing misting the air. Carrying her with them has slowed them and put them in danger, but Raine will not have her left behind. Not when she is giving so much to keep Ommatid’s claws from their minds.

  ‘Keep her safe,’ Raine says. ‘No matter what. No matter who threatens her.’

  There is understanding in Hale’s grey eyes. He nods.

  ‘Now,’ Raine says, over the vox this time, to the rest of them. ‘Push through!’

  As Raine gets to her feet, there’s an explosion from the far side of the implantation suite, followed by a series of screams. The gunfire from the Sighted fanatics stammers and stalls. Raine breaks cover to see that the door at the far end of the suite has been breached, blown inwards by a demo charge. The suite strobes with hellgun fire from the two figures in matt-black carapace who set the breach.

  ‘Apologies,’ Cassia Tyl’s voice is hoarse and edged with pain. ‘We were waylaid.’

  Daven Wyck goes headlong into the smoke and the fray. Everything is made sharp by the stimms. Crystal clear as the Sighted fanatics move slow around him. They are all skin and bones and bandages. Some have the bloodsoaked cloth wound around their eyes, though they still fight like they can see and still try to cut him with jagged blades and shards of black glass.

  But they are so very slow.

  Wyck ducks the strike of the first fanatic and answers it with one of his own, burying his knife blade straight between the Sighted’s collarbones. It goes in deep and grinds against something. Spine, maybe. He pulls the knife clear and kicks the fanatic onto his back. There’s not much blood, and what’s there is black and smells old. Beside him, Wyck sees Jey lock up his lasrifle trying to fire. The fanatic he was shooting at smiles wide and goes for him with an augmetic arm that ends with silver-tipped claws. Jey’s pale grey eyes widen in slow motion.

  Wyck throws himself at the fanatic, knocking him to the floor. Those silver-tipped claws rake across Wyck’s flak armour and snag deep in his knife arm, sending it numb. Wyck grabs the Sighted’s head with his other hand and slams it against the tiles. The first time the fanatic just goes dizzy and blank-eyed. The second time there’s a breaking sound and a splatter of blood. Wyck’s heart thunders and he finds he can’t quite catch his breath. Over the ringing in his ears he hears Jey say something. It takes a second to filter through.

  ‘Close,’ he is saying. ‘That was close.’

  Around them, the firefight has stopped. Wyck gets up off the dead fanatic and wipes black blood from where it has spattered on his face. Jey is looking at him funny. His grey eyes are still wide. It’s a look Wyck has seen before, from more folk than he can count. From Raf, all that time ago. From others before that too, because he’s never been the kind to pull his punches. It’s shock, that look. That, and a little disgust. He should be used to it, but with the witch dream still hanging over him it puts hooks in his soul and makes him feel discomforted, like a bright light shone in his eyes.

  It makes that silver aquila weigh heavy around his neck.

  ‘Give me your rifle,’ he says to Jey, as if there’s nothing wrong.

  The void-born hesitates a second.

  ‘Don’t make me ask twice,’ Wyck says.

  Jey blinks a couple of times and hands over the gun. Wyck ejects the cell and resets the firing control, muttering a soft word to the rifle as he does so, before pushing the cell into place and handing it back.

  ‘They lock like that when you don’t treat them right,’ Wyck says.

  Jey nods a little too quickly. ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know who is the more vicious, the Sighted or your kind.’

  The voice belongs to Justar, one of the Kavrone Dragoons. He is a sergeant too, marked by his gold epaulettes and the trim of his gloves. Hale told Wyck that Justar’s squad runs the edge too. It made Wyck laugh when he said it. From what he’s seen, the Kavrone know nothing at all about the edge. Justar looks down at the fanatic’s body with disgust. At the mess of it, and the wide arc of black blood.

  ‘You call yourselves wild, but feral would be better. Savage.’

  Wyck looks down at the body too. Then at Justar, with the las-burns on his blue and white armour. The scores and scorch marks on that Steadfast pattern rifle he carries.

  ‘It’s all killing,’ Wyck says. ‘Whether it’s pretty or not.’

  Justar scowls and mutters in his own tongue. Wyck has served in the field alongside the Kavrone plenty of times, often enough to pick up a few things.

  ‘Words like those, I think it’s you who is being savage,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that right, highborn?’

  The look the Kavrone is giving him, he’s liable to start a fight. A part of Wyck wants him to, so that he’ll have an excuse to hit back. To break Justar’s unbroken nose. His heart stammers and his fists curl of their own accord. The room runs like paint. Bright. Aching. Everything is so damned loud.

  ‘Careful, Antari,’ Justar says, warningly.

  Wyck can’t say anything back. Can’t see right. He has to shut his eyes.

  ‘Sarge.’

  Justar is gone. It’s Crys he’s looking at now. She frowns slow. Micro-expressions that crease her eyes and pull at the scars on her face. Wyck remembers her getting those scars. Remembers the way she screamed. All that shrapnel. Such a mess.

  ‘What?’ he says to her.

  ‘We’re moving,’ she says.

  She is. Everything is. Slowly like he’s underwater. Under the surface of the lake with the wraiths giggling in his ears. With their cold hands around his throat so he can’t get air. Can’t get out.

  ‘Moving,’ Wyck says, trying just to breathe. ‘Right.’

  Antar’s sky is thunderhead grey, like the roaring sea below it. The wind howls as if it is trying to outdo the ocean’s bad temper, rattling the leaves on the singing tree. Birds cry. Both Zane’s crows, and the seabirds who call the cliffs their home.

  ‘It has been a long time since I have seen such a place,’ Cretia Ommatid says.

  She is slumped against the bole of the singing tree, still bleeding from the knife wound in her chest. It is not a physical wound, of course. It is a different kind of hurt. A deeper kind. But despite it, Ommatid is still grinning. Not beaten.

  But Zane does not have to beat Ommatid. She just has to keep her busy.

  Ommatid tilts her head back to look up at the crown of the tree.

  ‘Do you see the way that the branches grow from a single point and spread, sometimes even turning back on one another?’

  Cretia Ommatid lowers her chin again and locks her crystal eyes on Zane.

  ‘It is like fate, and just like those branches, some fates are sure. They could take the weight of a body.’ She grins wider. ‘Of a hangman’s noose. But not all of them. Some are fragile. Fleeting. They will be broken by the storm.’

  Zane snorts a laugh. ‘Such wisdom,’ she says. ‘There is little wonder that you are elevated amongst fools.’

  Ommatid’s grin turns serrated.

  ‘Fools,’ Ommatid says, tasting the word. She spits bloody on the long grass. ‘No. We are enlightened. Freed from our bonds and our limits.’ She tilts her head. ‘Don’t you ever wonder what that would be like?’ Ommatid asks. ‘To be free?’

  For an instant, the scene tears away. Everything but the singing tree. The sea and the wind are replaced with the sound of screams, and Zane sees how it would be to be truly free. How she would break and injure and kill and revel in it. How her false eyes would blaze with unlight as a great, winged shadow unfolded itself from her back.

  ‘No,’ Zane says.

  The vision disappears, and the cliff returns. The song of birds. Ommatid, with her razor grin. Zane wipes her bloody nose on her sleeve and coughs. It rattles her lungs. She limps over to Ommatid, drops to her knees and pushes her spun wooden knife a
gainst the traitor’s throat. A bead of blood runs down the darkwood blade.

  ‘What you offer,’ Zane says. ‘It is poison. It is wicked.’

  Ommatid lets the knife press in. ‘They all think so, to begin with,’ she says. ‘But pain lends perspective. It is as I said, they all choose, just as your lost hound did.’

  Zane frowns. ‘A lost hound,’ she says. ‘You mean Caiden Rol.’

  Ommatid nods and it makes more blood run down the blade.

  ‘He resisted at first,’ she says. ‘So desperate to die for his crusade. For his Emperor. But when your Duskhound saw what truly waits beyond, he changed his mind. He begged me to spare him.’

  ‘No,’ Zane says. ‘You are lying. Duskhounds cannot be broken.’

  Ommatid shakes her head. ‘He was not broken,’ she says. ‘He was saved. I offered Caiden Rol a new fate, and he chose it gladly.’

  ‘More lies,’ Zane hisses. ‘Fates cannot be changed.’

  ‘Oh, my sweet,’ Ommatid says, with a smile. ‘Of course they can.’

  The scene changes again then, returning Zane to the Sanctum of Bones. To a cold and darkened chamber lined with heavy, rune-marked caskets, just like those that Zane saw in her dream. Shards of mirrored crystal have been placed on the floor to form the Sighted’s spiral mark, only this time a throne sits in place of the eye at the centre and in the throne, connected to it by needles and cables and bound by restraints, is Caiden Rol.

  The Duskhound is without his mask and his armour, and his face is so bloody that all Zane can really see are his eyes, glassy and unfocused. He is as still as the dead. He should be dead, but his soul hasn’t twisted free all the way. It is tethered, somehow. Kept from the After. Zane feels a tear trace its way down her cheek as Cretia Ommatid approaches Rol, walking the spiral barefoot and leaving bloody prints on the mirrored shards. The caskets around Zane begin to hum and the spiral of bloody mirrors starts to glow and glitter and light until it is afire with Ommatid and Rol at its centre. Zane can hear screams. Terrible, echoing screams, coming from within the caskets.

  Coming from those like Zane, who are gifted.